Adored (4 page)

Things went from bad to worse. The baby was born, and instantly little Peter became the center of his mother’s world, leaving Duke feeling even more excluded. He began another affair, then another, each time hoping to shock Minnie into realizing that he needed her.

She loved him, and was deeply hurt by his infidelities. But as the affairs became more and more frequent, she eventually stopped believing that she had any power to stop them. Duke was rapidly becoming a huge star, with some of the world’s most beautiful women throwing themselves at his feet. Obviously, Minnie thought, he no longer loved her. She learned to take comfort and joy in her children instead of her marriage, and she cloaked herself defensively in the stoic, reserved conservatism of her upbringing. Slowly but surely, she and Duke grew ever further and more irreparably apart.

And yet, to the surprise of all who knew them, they never did divorce. In fact, they never even discussed the possibility. Some said it was Duke’s almost superstitiously strong Catholicism that held the marriage together. Others saw Minnie as a masochist who would put up with just about anything for her children’s sake and to avoid a society scandal.

The truth, in fact, was much simpler. Somewhere, buried very deep in both their hearts, beneath the hatred, the bitterness, and all the many betrayals—a tiny fragment of love survived.

CHAPTER TWO

From Duke’s perspective, Caroline’s arrival was a huge success.

By eight o’clock the house was looking immaculate. Enormous vases of pink and white lilies jostled for position on the delicate Louis XV walnut tables littering the hacienda’s enormous marble entrance hall. Real log fires crackled in the dining room and drawing room (or “den” as Duke embarrassingly insisted on calling it, despite its palatial proportions), and a festive smell of pine mingled with the sweet, heady scent of the flowers. Two assistants had been hired to help Conchita, the McMahons’ cook, ensure that the lobster bisque, monkfish casserole, and lemon syllabub were cooked to perfection, much to that formidable Mexican matron’s fury. Minnie hated to upset Conchita, but it was imperative that tonight’s meal was beyond reproach.

Pete McMahon arrived home from work at six. Although more physically attractive than his younger sister, Pete was no heartthrob and, like Laurie, bore very little resemblance to either of his parents. To begin with, he was ginger-haired, although with age his coloring had mercifully faded from the carroty orange of his childhood to a nondescript sandy color, prematurely flecked with gray. He had his mother’s pale complexion, but while Minnie’s skin was luminous and pure, Pete looked permanently pasty and ill and had a tendency toward excessive sweating. He was well built, despite being short and physically lazy, and there was a certain bulldog strength about him that some women found attractive. Nevertheless, he generally made the worst of his looks, such as they were, thanks to a tragic penchant for ill-fitting suits as well as the scowl of resentment that hung almost permanently over his otherwise regular features.

Today he was looking even more bad-tempered than usual. What a shitty, shitty day it had been. His long-anticipated meeting with the producer Mort Hanssen had turned out to be a complete waste of time. Pete aspired to produce himself, and had had a couple of vanity credits on some half-decent low-budget pictures. But Mort, like everybody else in Hollywood, clearly still viewed him as Duke McMahon’s kid. The fact that at the age of thirty he still lived under his father’s roof obviously did nothing to improve his credibility. Man, he really had to do something about that, take the bull by the horns.

He and Claire, his quiet, shy new wife, remained largely financially dependent on Duke, living in a suite of rooms in the south wing of the main house. Although he had never shown even the most glancing interest in either of his two children, Duke was insistent that his entire extended family should remain living at Hancock Park. Having grown up the youngest of seven children in a vast Irish tribe, sleeping two or three to a bed, Duke liked big families. He also had a nearly pathological fear of being alone.

For Pete, living on the estate was like fucking torture. No privacy. No escape. After the day he’d had today, the last thing he needed was to play welcoming committee for some bimbo of his father’s.

Walking into the drawing room, he watched Minnie as she darted from kitchen to drawing room, tasting the soup or plumping up the already perfect overstuffed cushions. His heart lurched for her. He felt a sickening combination of love, sympathy, and an agonizing, impotent rage. Somehow his mother had made it a matter of
pride
to have the house looking wonderful for that little bitch. As if the fucking priest were coming over for Thanksgiving or something. Jesus. Why couldn’t she just once, just
once
stand up to him?

But Pete knew, probably better than anybody, that it wasn’t that easy to stand up to Duke. As a small boy, he had watched helplessly as his father systematically destroyed his mother’s happiness. It wasn’t just the other women. In fact, sexual infidelity, Pete reflected, was probably one of the least of his father’s crimes. Lust, after all, is instinctive. Whereas vindictiveness, decades of consistent casual cruelty, of emotional torture—now that was something you had to work at.

And boy, Duke had really worked at it. Jealous of Minnie’s better breeding, her East Coast education, and her innate good taste, he had brutally asserted his authority through a combination of economic control—Minnie never had her own bank account, nor did she spend a cent without first having to beg her husband’s permission—and sheer force of personality.

It didn’t help that for all Pete’s life, his father had been a megastar. A matinee idol in the thirties and forties, he had invested his earnings wisely and grown to become a respected Hollywood powerbroker. People fawned over Duke. People who didn’t even know him were mesmerized by him. Men fantasized about being him, women about screwing him. But none of them knew the real Duke McMahon—the vicious husband, the cold, autocratic father. Pete knew him, and for as long as he could remember, he had hated him.

But never more so, he thought, than today. Initially, he had refused to attend the dinner, telling his father rather pompously, but with an uncharacteristic display of nerve, that he and Claire would never break bread with his latest whore. In the end it was Minnie who persuaded him to change his mind. She needed him there when Caroline arrived, needed his and Claire’s moral support. Reluctantly, he had given in.

By eight-fifteen, Pete was sitting, stony-faced, in front of the drawing room fire, angrily shrugging off his wife’s feeble attempts to comfort him. His sister, Laurie, still looking tear-stained and lumpen in an utterly unsuitable, over-the-top gold lamé evening dress, was pacing the room anxiously, a habit that failed to improve Pete’s foul temper. Why did she always have to look such a fright?

Minnie, calm and regal as ever in a simple black crepe shift and pearls, sat rigid-backed beside the door. Contrary to all outward appearances, her stomach was churning. There had been a time when she believed that no behavior of her husband’s could surprise or hurt her anymore. But tonight, for the first time in many years, she did not know what to expect or how she was supposed to behave. She was in uncharted territory, and Pete’s palpable rage was doing as little as Laurie’s hysteria to calm her own fraught nerves. What in heaven’s name had she ever done to deserve this? She just wanted this evening over with.

All four of them jumped when the doorbell rang.

“Why is he ringing the bell?” snapped Pete. “He has a key, doesn’t he?”

Anxious to diffuse her son’s anger, Minnie took charge at once, standing to receive her guests with a serene smile glued to her face. “Antoine, would you get the door, please?”

The butler glided forward. “Of course, madam.”

The heavy black door swung slowly open. Duke was nowhere to be seen.

“How do you do?” The accent was cut-glass English. “I’m Caroline Berkeley. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to take my coat?”

The young woman before her was about as far removed from Minnie’s preconceptions as it was possible for her to be. She was beautiful, but certainly not tarty. Her hair, which was either naturally blond or very expensively dyed, was worn up in a neat chignon and contrasted dramatically with her flowing, feminine rainbow-effect Pucci dress (in fact, wasn’t that the dress Minnie had so admired in last month’s
Vogue
? It was, she was sure of it). Elegant strappy Yves Saint Laurent sandals revealed perfectly pedicured and subtly painted toes. Her makeup was minimal, intended only to heighten her almost neon-blue eyes and surprisingly delicate English complexion. This was no dime-a-dozen playgirl from Venice Beach. Caroline looked, disconcertingly, like a lady.

She was also unusually self-assured. Ignoring the butler, she handed her coat to a bewildered-looking Claire before turning to Minnie.

“So you must be Mrs. M.?” She smiled smugly. “How adorable you look in that dress! My mother has one just like it.”

Minnie failed to suppress a scowl.

“Dukey’s told me so much about you.” She winked at Minnie conspiratorially. “He’s just fetching my luggage, by the way, he should be here in a moment. Anyway, I’m sure we’ll have simply
tons
to talk about, swapping secrets and all that, but first of all I’m afraid I must use your loo. Or perhaps it’s my loo now?” Caroline laughed, pleased at her own wit, and strode off down the corridor. She evidently knew her way around the house.

Pete exploded. “Fucking arrogant bitch! And why the hell did you take her coat?” He shot an accusatory glance at the terrified Claire, who looked down at the cream Chanel wool in her hands in panic, as though it were about to self-destruct.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled meekly, “it just happened so quickly, I didn’t really have time to . . . I mean . . .”

“Oh, never mind. My God, that little slut has some nerve, treating my wife like a fucking maid. And the way she spoke to you, Mother. Who the hell does she think she is?”

Before Minnie could respond, Duke came sauntering triumphantly into the hallway, weighed down by two enormous Louis Vuitton suitcases. Taking in his wife’s look of shock, Pete’s undisguised fury, and Laurie and Claire’s subdued misery, he laughed out loud. “So, I guess you met Caroline, huh? Isn’t she great? Quite a looker, wouldn’t you say, Peter?” he added spitefully to his son.

“Sure.” Pete’s tone was utterly dead. “If you like cheap whores.”

Duke laughed again. Nothing was going to put him out of his good humor tonight, least of all his pussy of a son. “I’ll tell you something, kiddo, she may be a whore but she certainly isn’t cheap,” he said. “I paid five hundred dollars for that dress.”

Minnie felt a small, irrational stab of pain. Even in the early, happy days of their marriage, Duke had never spent anything close to that on her.

“Ask your mother.” Duke looked at Minnie, his eyes flashing with the excited cruelty of a cat playing with a cornered mouse. “She knows all about
class,
don’t you, my darling? Wouldn’t you say Caroline is elegant? She comes from one of the oldest, most aristocratic families in England. I mean, we’re not talking Greenwich here. Caroline’s from the
real
upper classes.”

He was hitting Minnie where it hurt and they both knew it.

Right on cue, Caroline sashayed back along the corridor, stilettos clacking painfully loudly on the polished marble, and wrapped herself possessively around Duke. “Darling,” she stage-whispered into his ear, “you know, we could always skip supper and just go straight to bed?”

Bitch, bitch, bitch, thought Pete. She’s enjoying this.

“Skip dinner?” Duke smiled at her proudly. “I don’t think so. My wife here has gone to a lot of trouble, sweetheart. And we wouldn’t want to be rude, now would we?”

At dinner, the pair of them were insufferable. Duke was deliberately, revoltingly affectionate toward his young mistress, constantly running his roughly wrinkled hand across her cheek or feeding her morsels of monkfish from his fork like a lovesick teenager.

Caroline was also in rare form, and no one was immune from her witheringly bitchy put-downs.

“Gosh, Laurie,” she exclaimed, wide-eyed, “you are brave. I always think gold is
such
a difficult color to pull off with a fuller figure.”

“Mrs. McMahon”—she seemed to delight in addressing Minnie pseudo-respectfully—“this food really is delicious. Heavens, if I had a cook as good as Conchita, I don’t expect I’d worry about my figure, either. Dukey, do you think she’ll be able to rustle me up something low-fat for breakfast tomorrow?”

Minnie’s self-control in the face of such provocation was quite astounding. Pete, on the other hand, rose like a starving, credulous fish to every piece of bait Caroline threw him.

“Now, Claire”—Caroline leaned forward across the table, giving both Pete and his wife a flash of her small but perfectly rounded porcelain-white breasts—“I
do
hope that you and I can become friends. It will be so nice to have a girl my own age to play with.”

“Really?” said Pete, stabbing viciously at his syllabub with a teaspoon. “And here we were all thinking you preferred playing with men old enough to be your grandfather.”

Claire looked miserably from Pete to Minnie. She had dressed particularly conservatively this evening, in a long taupe skirt and sweater, perhaps in a subconscious effort to fade into the background. Although undeniably a beautiful woman, with her shoulder-length mane of honey-blond hair and luminous creamy complexion, her shy looks paled into nothing when set beside Caroline’s glamour and electric sexual confidence. Not that it bothered her. Pete’s young wife didn’t have a vain bone in her body. She just wished that this awful woman who was so upsetting her husband would go away and leave them all alone.

“Peter, that’s enough,” said Duke, a razor-sharp edge biting into his famously deep, resonant voice. “Like it or not, Caroline is a member of this family from now on. I will not have her spoken to in that tone by anyone.”

Father and son glared at each other, their faces eerily illuminated by the candlelight, but Pete dropped his gaze first.

“Least of all you,” added Duke, folding his napkin with a measured finality to indicate that the conversation was now closed.

Laurie, who was suddenly feeling uncomfortable and awkward in what had been her favorite dress, was too choked with self-pity to rally to her brother’s support. Poor Claire kept her eyes glued firmly to her plate throughout the whole excruciating ordeal.

Buoyed by Duke’s support, and fueled by more than a few glasses of the vintage champagne Minnie had been told to lay on for the occasion, Caroline allowed her arrogance full rein, rudely snapping her fingers at the staff and generally behaving as though she were the established lady of the house. She had been dreading this evening, the inevitable showdown with the old man’s ghastly wife, but now that it had all gone so well, she felt deliriously happy.

All this wealth and privilege were hers for the taking, and she intended to grab them with both hands. How ridiculous to think that she had feared Minnie McMahon so much! The poor old stick was clearly no match for her. Caroline found it almost impossible to imagine the black-clad statue across the table from her, with her drawn features and tight-lipped reserve, as ever having been of sexual interest to Duke. She looked like a relic from another era, one of the many older women for whom the swinging sixties had swung right on by, and who woke up in the seventies to find the world they grew up in had disappeared forever.